Background: Though approximately 80% of teachers are women, they hold only about 50% of all principalships, and just a quarter of superintendent positions (Finnan and McCord, 2017; Robinson et al., 2017; Tienken, 2021; White, 2023). When women do take on leadership positions, evidence suggests they tend to work in districts serving students with…

There is a growing interest in the underlying mechanisms affecting female leaders in higher education. And this paper examines the problem by focusing specifically on Polish public universities which historically stands out by particularly low number of female university rectors. The core of the study is based on 15 in-depth expert interviews with…

Background/purpose: This study represents the first comprehensive study investigating the beliefs about the glass ceiling (GCB) of women working in Kazakh universities. It aims to examine the theoretical validity of the multidimensional structure of GCB in Kazakhstan's higher education context. Materials/methods: The study evaluated the glass…

Despite women's increased participation in academic employment patterns, a global gender gap on senior leadership in universities remains. This mixed methods study explores toxic leadership as a potential contributing factor to the gender gap on senior management levels in universities in South Africa. The Schmidt Toxic Leadership Scale (2008) is…

A recent study published in "Educational Researcher" by White (2023) examined superintendent gender gaps. This work required 4 years of internet searches to identify and match superintendent names with each of the roughly 13,000 school districts in the United States. Although this study provided important insights into the superintendent…

This article examines the job crafting strategies senior academic women use to progress in their careers. The study was exploratory and inductive and used in-depth interviews to gather data from 43 senior academic women in Australia, the United Kingdom, and Malaysia. Data were analyzed using thematic content analysis in combination with reflective…

Using a culturally relevant leadership lens, this phenomenological study looks at the lived experiences of two female urban school leaders in Pakistani private schools. It highlights the structural enablements and barriers they faced across two different periods -- the 1990s and the 2020s providing reflectively-nuanced insight into female school…

The present article proposes to broaden the understanding of the life courses of women executives to include an experiential perspective of meaning built around their different life projects. Our study is based on a qualitative approach employing narrative research methodology to analyze interviews with a sample of 51 women executives. Our…

Mexico, the second-largest economy in Latin America after Brazil, has a gender gap index score of 76.4% in 2022 compared to 75.7% in 2021 and is ranked 31 out of 146 countries for 2022. Mexico has become one of the world's leaders in gender-political equality, which shows that the gender ceiling is cracking, and it is yet to see if gender parity…

Objective: This research study examined gender wage equality among administrators across Arizona's ten community college districts comprising 19 colleges. Method: Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze salary data. Results: All 19 college campuses evidenced differences in median income between 12-month, full-time women…

This nationwide study of 532 female school district superintendents, the largest such sample to date, offers compelling evidence that unconscious gender bias exists on the job and further inhibits equitable female representation in the superintendency. A modified version of Tran et al.'s (2019) Perceived Subtle Gender Bias Index (PSGBI), was…

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the extent of sustainability disclosure through websites at Spanish universities and analyse the determinants that affect such disclosure. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses as methodology a content analysis of the sustainability information disclosed by universities on their official websites in…

"Plantation politics" refers to the lingering impact of slavery's afterlife or how vestiges of enslavement permeate contemporary culture, including institutions of higher education (IHEs; Hartman, 2008; Squire et al., 2018; Williams et al., 2021). For Black women administrators (admins), the enduring legacy of caretaking, bodily control,…

Women in education are strongly represented in the classroom but are much less likely to become school district superintendents. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to understand how women who have been superintendents for at least 3 years experienced mentoring and role preparation as they worked to attain the position. A transcendental…

This qualitative study examined how female principals from two nations that recently opened up new avenues for women in educational leadership defined instructional leadership and what they did to prepare to become school principals. Using an open-ended survey and snowball sampling, female school leaders from Saudi Arabia and Qatar who led a…